It's Just A Joke
by moviefan-92
Summary: As Jeremiah continues to pretend to be brain-dead in Arkham while waiting for Bruce to return, he thinks back to his evolution to how he became the Joker... and finds it hilarious. Bad summary. COMPLETE


**(A/N: Ok, so, I wanted to write this pretty much since the final episode of _Gotham_. As you may or may not know, I like to get into the heads of certain characters, and one of them was _Gotham_'s version of the Joker. I decided to evaluate his thought process in regards to his 'creation' from how he went from Jeremiah Valeska to Joker, and how he sees the world, while taking a few more traits from the comics into account. It's short, but I like how it turned out.)**

**Disclaimer: I own nothing.**

**"IT'S JUST A JOKE"**

Playing the catatonic mental patient in Arkham was not easy. And it wasn't because he had to sit totally and completely still all day, every day. It wasn't because he occasionally got an itch he couldn't scratch without giving himself away, or because an eyelash ended up in his eye, or he got a tickle in his throat or nose that made him want to cough or sneeze. It wasn't even because Edward Nygma, aka The Riddler, had just stabbed him in the leg with a broken paintbrush. No, what made playing the perfect brain-dead vegetable so hard was trying not to laugh.

How long had it been since he had actually regained his senses after falling into that vat of chemicals? He honestly had no idea, but he had continued to play the part. After all, he didn't have much of a reason to go on, not since Bruce Wayne left to go to… wherever he went. Days, weeks, months, even years went by, and yet time simply ran together, having no meaning, not without Bruce around. He was either there, or he wasn't; any other form of time was meaningless. Without him, there wasn't much point to anything. So for now, Jeremiah Valeska was perfectly content to keep up the act, for however long was necessary. And so far, ten years had gone by.

But now that Bruce returned, all bets were off. Jeremiah's body may have been inactive, at least when prying eyes were around, but his mind was always active. And he had plans. Big plans. So many big plans.

Or not. Maybe he would just wing things and make them up as he went along. It didn't matter. Nothing mattered. All anything was good for was a laugh. And if the person he wanted to make laugh the most wasn't around, then there wasn't much of a point to anything.

Despite his outward stupor, he heard Riddler say something stupid in an attempt to be funny. The guy really was a B-lister. And for as smart as he was, he didn't even know the difference between a riddle and a joke. Riddles had answers and solutions. They could be figured out and solved, and there was a reason behind them. But jokes served no purpose. They didn't have to make sense, they were completely pointless, and were only good for a laugh.

And that there was the key. After all, comedy was objective. What one person found funny, other people might not. Jeremiah, he found everything to be funny, and he wanted others to join in on the laugh. Life was just one big joke after all. But no one else seemed to see that. They were all so serious all the time, so they didn't get the joke. But that was precisely why Jeremiah kept taking shots at them, because you always take shots at those who couldn't take a joke. And as far as he was concerned, no one was more serious than Bruce Wayne. With the way he legitimately and sincerely wanted to save everyone and make the world a better place, he just couldn't see the funny side to life, that life was just a joke and should be laughed at.

One of the funniest things about all this was that people kept calling him mad. They said he was completely insane, even crazier than his psychotic twin brother, Jerome. But that wasn't true, he just saw what they couldn't. He could see the funny side to things, to everything, and he couldn't help but to laugh at it. If other people could see the funny side as well, then they would laugh too. After all, everyone was just one bad day away from ending up just like him, from no longer pretending to be kind decent people and giving into their darkness. And if everyone else was just one bad day away from ending up just as 'mad' as him, then clearly this wasn't insanity. He was just ahead of the curve, and this so-called insanity label was just a word that people used so they could hold onto their false personas and wouldn't see that other part of themselves, that dark part that they didn't want to admit was there and did everything they could to avoid it.

Jeremiah used to try to avoid his once too, and all it had taken was one bad day for him to give in. He still remembered that day. It was the day his brother died, and had left him that present that ended up being filled with a poison gas meant to drive a person insane.

His brother, now _he_ had been insane. A true psychopath. The guy did crazy things for absolutely no reason. That's what insanity was, wasn't it? To do the same thing over and over again, hoping for a different outcome, or doing things that made absolutely no sense and expecting something to come out of it. Those were signs of true insanity, and Jeremiah had provided an example of how his brother was insane and he was not.

In Jerome's journal, he had wrote that one way he wanted to kill Bruce was by covering him in honey and having him get stung to death by bees. Now _that_ was crazy. What would have been the point of that? Now, if Jeremiah had wanted to kill Bruce, he would have simply shot him in the head. Both ways would have resulted in Bruce's death, but Jerome's way was completely pointless and made no sense. Why go through all that trouble if there was no reason behind it or some bigger part of a plan? It was insane!

And his brother didn't want to be alone in his insanity. He wanted to surround himself in madness, and so he had developed a toxic gas meant to drive people insane. He'd used it on others, driving them out of their minds. And after his death, he had arranged to have a package containing a canister that had sprayed Jeremiah with an extra special, extra heavy dose of his crazy gas.

For years, Jeremiah had tried to avoid his brother. He knew Jerome was a psychotic monster beneath the façade he put on to fool everyone. And Jerome was convinced that Jeremiah was just as crazy as him, and had repeatedly tried to do everything he could to bring that side of him out.

Well, he had been half right. Jeremiah wasn't crazy, but there was that darker side to him, the side he knew people would call him crazy for if they saw it. So he had done everything he could to hide it. He'd distanced himself from his brother as much as possible and used his genius to try and help people, doing anything and everything he could to show that he wasn't a monster. Quite frankly, it was exhausting trying to be something he wasn't all the time, and he was always afraid that he would slip up and people would see his true colors, or that his brother would find him one day and succeed in bringing out the person he really was. And that was why he was so afraid, because he knew that Jerome was right about him.

And then his brother had died, and Jeremiah had thought that that was it. He was finally free. No one else knew what he was really like, nor would they try to bring out that side of him. He could continue being who the world thought he was, who Bruce thought he was. Until the gas.

Jeremiah had known what it was. From the moment the gas had hit his face and he had breathed it in, he had known that it was his brother's insanity gas. Jerome's mocking voice message had been completely unnecessary; Jeremiah had known that the gas was going to drive him mad.

Only it hadn't. That had been a real surprise. He'd felt exactly the same as he had all his life. The gas had had absolutely no affect on him at all. At least not mentally. Physically, on the other hand, it had given him a new, permanent makeover. Greenish colored hair, bright red lips, chalk white skin, and even lightening his eyes and changing the color so they looked a pale yellowish-green. But mentally, it hadn't affected him in the least.

The realization that his mind had been unaffected had been hilarious. In fact, his whole life seemed hilarious, like it was all one bad joke. He had tried so hard for so long, putting in so much time and effort into hiding who he really was, and in one fell swoop, he had thought that his brother had rendered all that hard work useless. There had been no point to anything Jeremiah had ever done, because he was going to end up just as mad as his brother after all thanks to Jerome's crazy gas. And it had been funny. So funny that he hadn't been able to hold in the laughter any longer.

But it hadn't affected him. And that just made his whole revelation that his life was a pointless joke yet another joke. That's when he realized that everything was a joke, _everything!_ And if everything was one big, meaningless joke, then there was no reason to hide who he was and what he was like. He had been trying so hard to hide and suppress that side of him, and it had just ended up coming out when he thought he was going to go mad, so he stopped fighting it and embraced it instead. It had been so liberating. He didn't need to pretend any longer, he could be who he really was, and show it to the whole world.

In fact, thanks to his new appearance, the world could now literally see his "true colors". And they resembled a clown of all things, as if the universe itself was making a joke out of him. And if life was just one big joke, then he might as well laugh at it.

Not that he had been laughing at first. After his initial epiphany, he had been all business, trying to establish himself and make the world see who he really was. You didn't laugh before the punch line was delivered, so he had to completely reel in his emotions for as long as he could while he prepared the delivery. But once the world saw the real him, and both he and they could see the big picture, he could finally openly laugh at it.

If only he could get everyone else to see the funny side too, but they were all so serious and thought he was crazy. Well, the world was crazy. And if the world was crazy, then that meant that he was really quite sane, no matter what anyone said.

But he would show them, he would show them all how much of a joke life was. Especially his good friend Bruce. And then they could all laugh together. But for now, he would wait and bide his time. After all, when telling a joke, timing was everything.

**THE END**

**(A/N: I must admit, I was kind of skeptical about Jeremiah becoming the Joker instead of Jerome. It was a slow process, where he went from a cold, calculating, unfeeling, sociopath to a raging lunatic, but in the end, I think it worked out nicely. Seeing him becoming more and more crazy until he made his final reveal as the Joker in the last episode was great, and I was very pleased with the final result. Which was why I became interested in his evolution and wanted to get into his head a bit to see things through his eyes. So let me know what you think.)**


End file.
